Much of The Sandman season 2 is about reclaiming the narrative. It’s true of Dream (Tom Sturridge). After the odyssey to retrieve his artifacts and restore his kingdom in the Netflix drama’s freshman go, the one known as Morpheus believes it’s business as usual, until his past mistakes, made across thousands of years, come back to haunt him.
“That’s the entirety of the second season: how to reckon his idea of who he is with who he was to all the people in his life,” Allan Heinberg, showrunner and executive producer, tells Entertainment Weekly. “Dream has a very secure narrative about who he is, what his story is, what other people have done to him, and what he’s done to them. But he’s the hero of that story. In season 2, he realizes, ‘Oh! I’m the bad guy in Nada’s [Deborah Oyelade] story, I’m the bad guy in Lyta’s [Razane Jammal] story, I’m the bad guy in my son’s story [Ruairi O’Connor as Orpheus]. And it rocks him.”
Reclaiming the narrative is true for the creatives, as well. Netflix’s January announcement that season 2 would also be the final season came at a time when several sexual misconduct allegations were made against Neil Gaiman, the co-creator of the original Sandman comics who also developed the series. The assumption was that the two events were related, since multiple other Gaiman projects were either delayed, reworked, or canceled entirely.
Heinberg sets the record straight: “It was a decision we made three years ago,” he says of season 2 being the final season.
Ed Miller/Netflix
Mason Alexander Park as Desire, Donna Preston as Despair, Barry Sloane as Destruction, Esmé Creed-Miles as Delirium
Warner Bros. Television assembled a writers’ room to chart the future of the adaptation months before season 1 premiered. Heinberg remembers workshopping “lots of different versions of what season 2 could be,” and then refining it further once Netflix’s top brass evaluated the audience response.
The creatives landed on a goal, which was to keep Dream the focus of the story. Easier said than done, it turns out. Though there are 16 volumes of comic book material to pull from, Heinberg was quickly reminded of how much Dream is actually involved. “There are some volumes where he just appears in two scenes,” the showrunner explains. “There’s so many protagonists in Sandman, but you think of the whole thing as his story.”
Heinberg’s showrunner brain did the math around what he calls “hard story.” How much of the comics depict Dream doing something? How many hours of TV and how many script pages does that then yield? “It turned out to be about another season’s worth of story, without leaving out anybody’s favorite moments or scenes,” he says. Season 2 will now be split into a six-episode Volume 1 (premiering July 3) and a five-episode Volume 2 (premiering July 24).
There will inevitably be some storylines missing as a result of this approach. For example, Season of Mists and Brief Lives are two key comics the show adapts in season 2, but the writers did not tackle A Game of You. That’s one of those narratives that only features a couple of Dream scenes. However, Heinberg teases “there were elements” from A Game of You “that we needed to get to Brief Lives.”
He continues, “We managed to add a great deal of material, as we did in season 1, and a lot of really fun surprises for fans of the comics who know the entire story. We pulled from a lot of different sources. We took a lot of the single-issue stories and wove them into the fabric of Dream’s narrative.”
One such single-issue story is A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Gaiman’s tale about the creation of William Shakespeare’s legendary play of the same name. (In this version of events, Dream is involved.) Jack Gleeson, now so far removed from his days as the dreaded Joffrey on Game of Thrones, arrives on the scene as Puck, as shown in EW’s exclusive first look at the character.
Courtesy Of Netflix
First look at Jack Gleeson as Puck in ‘The Sandman’ season 2
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“He brings so much depth to that part,” Heinberg comments on Gleeson’s casting. “He brings sexiness to it and mischief and psychology and heart. I have a tendency to write to the actors playing these parts, and I think our Puck is a very different Puck from the comics, but also from the Puck that I would’ve written for any other actor.”
EW can also officially reveal Destruction (shown above), played by Revenge alum and House of the Dragon newcomer Barry Sloane. Also known as “the Prodigal,” this character has long since abandoned his realm and his familial responsibilities to the other Endless, which includes Death (Kirby Howell-Baptiste), Desire (Mason Alexander Park), Despair (Donna Preston), Delirium (Esmé Creed-Miles), and Destiny (Adrian Lester). But he and his talking-dog companion, Barnabas (Steve Coogan), will finally make an appearance alongside his immortal siblings.
Heinberg says much of Sloane’s dialogue as Destruction was taken directly from the comics. “He has such a lightness of touch, and he’s such a loving human,” he says of the actor. “That’s really what we were looking for in casting this role. You think of Destruction, especially as he’s presented in the comics during The Song of Orpheus story, as the ultimate destroyer of worlds. His story in the comic, and in our show as well, is actually a soul that’s in conflict. He wants to create, he doesn’t want to destroy. So you need an actor who is so full of love and so full of joy and yet looks like the archetypal soldier.”
This is the final season story the writers set out to make, which aligns with the original pitch Heinberg gave Netflix years ago — “a family drama above all,” he notes. The announcement of the final season was just “unfortunate timing, for sure,” he comments. When the headlines about Gaiman came out, Heinberg says the crew had nearly finished production and were about to begin postproduction.
“I can’t say that it affected our process, which is scheduled years in advance. These are your delivery dates and you just keep going,” he continues. “So it’s been in the periphery of my experience and the background of my experience, but it hasn’t been part of the world of the making of the show, if that makes sense. Every production is its own little island. Even though we were in London, my experience was very limited to the making of the show, even in my personal life, which I did not have for the last six years.”
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